Friday, December 16, 2011

Dart at g|egypt 2.0

I gave a talk on Dart at g|egypt 2.0. All I can say is, wow!

First of all, I wasn't even on the agenda. In fact, the room I was using wasn't really even labelled on the map--it took me several minutes to find it. It was a small room. 2 minutes before my talk was supposed to start, I only had 3 people in the audience. However, 10 minutes later, every seat was taken, and people were standing at the back and along the sides. The room was packed!

Since Dart is so new, we haven't spoken about it at very many places. I told the Egyptians that I was giving them a chance to become the best Dart programmers in the world because they were seeing the talk before most of the rest of the world had seen it. I almost got a standing ovation ;)

People were very excited about Dart and asked a ton of excellent questions. Even after my talk, I had to stand around for 2.5 hours answering more questions.

The comments on Google+ were very supportive:

Hady Allam said, "your DART session is one of the best sessions i have ever attended. Thank You +Shannon Behrens and hope to see you again in Egypt."

Abdurrahman Alraies said, "The dart session was the best surprise of the day. Thank you very much +Shannon Behrens and +Sebastian Trzcinski-Clément It says much about how important is Egypt to Google."

Saied Attala said, "really i have opened the comment box for 30 minutes and can't write every thing for you. i loved your Dart sessions and your sense of humor. i enjoyed talking with you and having pics with you."

Those comments were very touching to me. To all the Egyptians out there who went to my Dart talk, thank you for making me feel so special! I hope I get to come back to Egypt again!

After the trip, I accidentally ran into Lars Bak, the creator of Dart, in Zurich. That was very exciting for me!